"A mushroom lasts for only a very short time. Often I go in the woods thinking, after all these years, I ought finally to be bored with fungi. But, coming upon any mushroom in good condition, I lose my mind all over again. Supreme good fortune: we're both alive!"
• Email: paddyagius@hotmail.com
• Discord: Shmin#8422
• Twitter: @PaddyAgius
• Instagram: @dubtechno_googler
• RateYourMusic: ~Shmin
My name is Paddy Agius, and I am an independent writer from Nottingham in the UK. I self publish everything I finish here on this site: I would describe most of it as essays about aesthetics which are informed by observations from phenomenology and history, but there are some exceptions if you want to look for them. If you're wondering where to start, the front page has my most recent publications, but if a cryptic list of titles isn't your thing some of my better pieces include:
• The Alien Snail That Lives With You in Symbiosis; or, Rave Embeddings
• Hyperoptics: Lessons From Cinematic Vision
• Five UK Dance Tunes From the Year 2000
• Eleven Aphorisms About Silence via Dreaming or Structure or Both
The first is about the philosophy of technology, the second is about the aesthetics of modernism, the third is a collection of essays about music, and the fourth is a collection of short poetic utterances.
For the first half of 2024 I published one piece every other Monday, but decided in the second half of the year to slow right down. One of the reasons for this was that I was dealing the illness and then death of my dad, but truthfully I might have continued posting from an archive of completed material if I had wanted to. The main reason that I didn't was that, increasingly, the pieces on this site were edited-down excerpts from what is shaping up to be my first novel.
Aftermath Campaign is a novel about a group of people who, from the mid 00s to the mid 10s, play a single longform fantasy roleplaying game over internet forums. The book loosely follows their campaign, but is structured as a set of freeform essays which use the substance of this game and these players to discuss philosophy, history, the nature of storytelling and the disintegration of the kinds of online space they once knew.
I expect the book to be finished in late 2025, but could easily be sooner or later given the unpredictable nature of writing experimental fiction and the long work of grieving my dad. The novel is what occupies almost all of my writing time. Since the middle of the year I have posted a few shorter excerpts here which work well as self contained pieces, but I would like to keep these excerpts rare so the book is mostly new material when it is published. My other long term projects are a book which combines the philosophy of time and a history of dance music, currently in its planning stage, and a collection of short stories. I don’t have any idea what I will call the collection, but some of the working titles for stories I plan to include are Villa of the Deaf One, The Gorilla Herders, and Dialogue Unearthed in the Aswan Geniza Between Kesta Wahed and Alexandrian Dhimmi Theologians Concerning Divine Mind. All of these have been started but none of them will be finished before Aftermath Campaign is.
As for this site, updates will be sporadic. This shouldn’t bother anyone because there is plenty of old material to look at. To any fellow fans of dance music I started keeping a charts page which lists my 100 favourite rave tracks of every year, and I regularly fiddle with and add to that.